First of all, I’d like to express my thanks to the organizer, who keep inviting me.

Today I’m going to talk about power, not soft power, but electric power.Because recently the government includes PDP (Power Dilemma Plan) as their policy, try to promote electric power in the country. This morning, one of the presenters also talks about it. We have no electricity. So there is a problem about economic investment. Once the government comes up with this PDP, we think we can have a chance to get involved in this process. So here I’m going to represent how the civil societies think on this issue. There is at least 499 civil societies. I also choose this topic because it has been interrelated to many subject, its trigger many broader one, it relates to political backwardness, social conflict, economy.

Let’s look at this graph. This is the government describing the situation of electricity generation in Myanmar. At present, electricity generation is about 4362 megawatt. Then you can see there is a 13% economic growth rate and then it’s expected to achieve 23592MW by 2030. They thought that annually we have to install 30% to achieve our economy objective. Because when government considers increasing electricity generation, what the resource they’re talking about is of course the hydropower, one of the big potential in Myanmar. According to the statistics, Myanmar so far has only complete 7% of that potential. That’s why hydropower is considered as a great potential.

The left-hand graph shows the exiting power generation in Myanmar, 74% is by hydro, 23% from gas and 3 % from fire power. That’ll drastically change when they come up with this PDP because they’re talking about to increase for example power plant to 3% to 33%. So what really irritates civil society? Is this necessary?This is the basic question we have for the government plan.

There is a counter argument over the PDP.

First question is demand forecast correct? Because in the demand forecast, you can see at least one of the megawatt is necessary to install annually, but if you look at the picture here, this is about Thailand, our neighboring country. From 1992 to 2012, with, the 20 years, they only meet 800 MW. By no circumstances can we compare to Thailand. I think, to us that are why government projection like 1000 MW is too much over estimated. So that’s why it creates another problem: How the electricity will be generated by, the resource, you know. There is a fundamental flaw. That’s why we call to review on this.

Second, is it really cheap? The government calls for the coal plan because it’s cheap. They use the graph showing above because they thought that showing the graph without source they’re showing to the parliament, if you use solar power, you’re paying 30 higher. But on the other hand, like hydro power is only 6 and coal for 9 and gas is 10. But again, according to AUS, look at the graph at left bottom, there is a trend for solar price descending from time to time. At present, the cost for the solar photovoltaic is only 11 cent by unit. So our governments say 25. So this we really have to look at the source again. We really have to recalculate the actual cost. Look at the right hand side, the coal price always fluctuate like this.

Next, is it a quick-min? According to our searching, it’ll take at least 4 to 7 years to build such a coal power plant. Our India colleague say within 3 years they can built it, is it true?

Another one is: is it environmentally clean? Even you use the so-called clean coal technology; you cannot really reduce the problem of Nitrogen, and other problem.

Is it technically sound? If you installing Window 8 Software in 1990 model computer hardware, it cannot operate because it’s too complicated. This technology is a drying technology; it’s not going to be very promising. As for big hydropower, how can you build on without reliable time series baseline data?

If you look overseas, Obama administration they are restricting climate action plan in the 2013. As a consequence, many banks withdraw financing from giving to the coal. So who is going to finance now for our coal project? So we also have a financial question. China Exim Bank? China Development Bank? 4.5% p.a interest rate? JBIC? Again in the hydropower, an Oxford recent study said“those who claim large scale hydropower is profitable, they either be liar of fool.”Because every big project has the problem of slippage and cost overrun. And the government does not have a PPA yet.

I’ll conclude with this one, we’re not denying that we need electricity, yes, we need it, but for whom? As you see in the picture, the woman is still carrying firewood. By that, I’ll stop my presentation here.